[Box Backup] Using multiple servers

[Chris Wilson]

Hi all,

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, Ben Summers wrote:

>>>> The command 'bbackupctl sync' reported: "Using configuration file 
>>>> /etc/box/bbackupd.conf" but remained silent after that. No idea 
>>>> if that is suppose to happen, but the sync started anyhow after some 
>>>> time. It is in any case not clear to the end-user what is going on.
>>>
>>>  You should see a summary of the server configuration, and a "Succeeded" 
>>>  message.
>> 
>>  It works now. I am sure it didn't work yesterday before the sync was 
>>  started. Could it be because the deamon is busy investigating the system 
>>  that it has no time to react to bbackupctl? I will investigate some more 
>>  when I install the
>>  other backups.
>
> That might be it. If the daemon is busy, it may not respond quickly.

The client daemon (bbackupd) on Unix does NOT respond to the command 
socket while it is not idle, especially during backups. I would like to 
change this, but it introduces a small additional overhead of polling the 
socket repeatedly while the backup is running, and I have so far not been 
able to persuade the other developers that this is worthwhile.

The Windows client uses a separate thread to monitor the command socket, 
and I think it should always respond and you should be able to cancel a 
backup in progress. On some Unix platforms it would be possible to use 
a thread as well, but such code has unfortuntely not been written yet.

>>  or does it do its job more intelligent by keeping a montly, weekly and 
>>  daily backup of everything? It is not clear to me in the documentation.
>
> I want to revisit this in the next release but one.

I'd like to see the client having the ability to decide for itself which 
files should be deleted and when - not just a Deleted flag, as currently 
implemented. This would allow much greater flexibility in choice of backup 
schemes by the client. Unfortunately I haven't had time to implement this 
yet, and I think Ben was opposed to the idea when I last proposed it.

>>  For my MySQL database I use replication, and I make a daily export of all 
>>  data with mysqldump. This dump is then being tarred and stored as a .tgz. 
>>  Is this the recommended method or is it better to leave the .sql as it is, 
>>  so BoxBackup can transfer only the changes of the export?
>
> Leave sql dump as it is.

I have a feeling that backing up gzip-compressed files will result in 
relatively inefficient increments, since changing any part of the file 
will change all the subsequent data. I think that storing the sql dump 
uncompressed would result in more efficient space usage on the server. 
Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Cheers, Chris.
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